in which i start off with obesity report cards and get far, far off topic on health/morality tangents…

The New York Times has an interesting piece today on obesity report cards.

The practice of reporting students’ body mass scores to parents originated a few years ago as just one tactic in a war on childhood obesity that would be fought with fresh, low-fat cafeteria offerings and expanded physical education. Now, inspired by impressive results in a few well-financed programs, states including Delaware, South Carolina and Tennessee have jumped on the B.M.I. bandwagon, turning the reports — in casual parlance, obesity report cards — into a new rite of childhood.

The article provides anecdotes about a 6-year old who is now loathe to eat because she was at the top of the normal-weight-percentile and thinks her teachers will be mad at her if she goes above that; an 8-year old who has begun daily weigh-ins and boasting about her low-weight status like one would boast about an A on a regular report card; and the size-20 homecoming queen who the author uses as a symbol of Pennsylvania’s apparently different-from-the-rest-of-the-US weight standards (oh yeah, tell me this teenage girl really doesn’t care at all that she’s a size 20).

The thing about the obesity report card is it’s operating under that age-old patronizing assumption that fat people (or in this case, fat kids or the parents of fat kids) don’t realize that they’re fat and need to have it pointed out to them at every opportunity, without really addressing causes or solutions.

Here, in the rural Southern Tioga School District, the schools distribute the state-mandated reports even as they continue to serve funnel cakes and pizza for breakfast.

Which, to be fair, I imagine it’s pretty likely the school doesn’t just offer pizza and funnel cakes for breakfast. It would be silly to imagine it doesn’t also offer things like apples and cereal and granola bars. It’s not the school’s job to see that kids reach for these options instead of a pepperoni slice. It’s also not the school’s job to tell children and their parents that they are fat, as if they’ve just failed to notice, or as if they’re aren’t doctors to handle that task.

I have such conflicting views on the so-called “obesity epidemic” in the US. On the one hand, yes, rising obesity rates are, well, bad. No one can argue against that. But it seems that every solution that anyone ever proposes to combat this does nothing but increase our collective societal schizophrenia about weight.

Part of me wants to say that American’s fatness speaks to a general state of over-consumption and parental refusal to set limits for their children and disgraceful national shift away from physical past-times to sedentary ones, and I take this very negative viewpoint towards it. Then I remember that I was raised on gushers and potato chips and pizza lunchables, that I do not exercise, I spent most of my childhood sitting and reading and most of my adult life in front of a computer, and the only reason I myself remain thin, I think, is through a blessing of good genes and metabolism.

Sometimes I find myself getting caught up in those think-about-your-health arguments for why people should lose weight. Other times I get disgusted by the perceived moral superiority of thin-ness and using health as a ruse for moral projections. If people damn well don’t want to lose weight, then why should they? There’s no inherent moral obligation to be healthy. I smoke a pack-a-day of cigarettes, which is probably a hell of a lot worse for me than an extra 20 pounds would be. And I have no desire to quit, because I like smoking, and … and somehow, I’ve gotten far, far off topic … reasons for smoking is another blog post entirely ….

… our society treats being overweight as a sign of immorality. The only other privilege even remotely like thinness in this sense is wealth, in the assumption that the wealthy/thin have earned their privilege through hard work. The problem is that it’s horse shit, utter horse shit. Most thin people will tell you straight up, if we’re honest, that we don’t “work” at it. High metabolism is a genetic trait, and to a degree it might just be a habit of sorts …